I see Catcher making his way toward the cable car and my heart lurches. I wish I could be sure that he wouldn’t reject me—not again. But I know I have to risk it—I have to see him before he leaves. I have to tell him I’m sorry for being so angry on the roof.
I have to fight for him.
Quickly, I pull on my damp coat and run through the flat to the stairs and out into the night. I race toward the platform, watching as Catcher strides to the car that will take him away.
“Catcher!” I scream, not caring that I’m drawing attention to myself. Not caring about anything but seeing him. Touching him. But he’s already in the car, pulling the door shut. I stoop and grab a handful of snow. As hard as I can, I throw it at him and it explodes against the side of the car.
I grab another. “Catcher, wait!” But the Unconsecrated in her little wheel is already lumbering forward, grinding the gears that will propel Catcher away from me. I climb up to the launch platform as the car hovers over the middle of the river.
He stands looking out the broken back window, his hands tucked into his pockets and a small sad smile on his face. My breath hitches. I still have the remnants of a snowball in my hand, a streak of red from my thumb smeared across it where I somehow cut myself. I take a few steps toward the ledge and then I let it go.
It sails through the air and Catcher doesn’t even try to dodge it but instead lets it hit square on his chest. Where his heart is. He doesn’t move or do anything but stare at me. In the darkness his cheekbones look sharper under his skin and dark shadows fan around his eyes.
He looks exhausted and lonely and I ache wishing I could leap across the distance between us. To pull him to me and let his heat devour me.
I hold my arms out wide. “I’m sorry,” I scream at him, but I don’t know if he hears me. Instead the car just continues to take him back to the Dark City, the cables jolting. I can see when it lands, see him stepping out among a sea of Unconsecrated.
“Catcher.” My voice breaks. I want to tell him to wait. To come back. To simply let me touch him and look at him and make sure he’s okay. I need to know that everything’s all right with him and me and this world.
I just need to feel the heat of him.
But I don’t know how to tell him all this. That I’m scared and I don’t know how to be normal. I’m broken, just like him, and I’m not sure I can fix myself.
“Catcher.” This time my voice is barely a whisper. “Please,” I add.
He looks up at me, his face gaunt and oh-so sad and lonely. I want to know if he’s been eating and sleeping and taking care of himself. I reach out a hand to him but he’s so far away. He stands there, a rock in the river of Unconsecrated undulating around him. It’s like he doesn’t exist to them.
And then he raises one hand to his mouth, fingers touching his lips. I raise my own hand to my lips as he fades into the wash of death and disappears.
I stand there shivering, wishing he’d come back, but there’s nothing. Just the dead struggling out onto the partially frozen river before the ice cracks and swallows them, lifeless fingers clambering for the stars.
“Doesn’t look like he’s too interested in you,” a voice says. I turn to find a Recruiter climbing the platform steps. He weaves toward me. “His loss.” His ss come out as a slurred hiss. He stops out of reach, his mouth breaking into a slow grin, then adds, “My gain.”
I freeze. My eyes dart everywhere, trying to determine the best escape. The platform’s long and narrow, stairs down to the island on one end and the other hanging out past the wall over the river. There’s a rickety railing of sorts with a rope ladder leading down to the shore. But even if I were to crawl through it I’d just end up on the wrong side of the barricades with no way to get back inside.
Below me a few Unconsecrated who’ve found purchase on the tiny shore reach up for me. One of them’s bald with a white tunic, like the woman in the cage inside the main building. Their moans rip away on the wind.
I shove my hands in my pockets, feeling the small lump of my switchblade there. It’s not much and probably couldn’t cause any mortal wounds, but it makes me feel calmer just holding the cold metal.
I shake my hair back from my face, knowing that the light from the fire at the end of the platform will highlight the scars along my cheek and neck. I hope it makes me look fierce—like a fighter.
The Recruiter’s smile grows wider. “Not many women on this island anymore,” he says. “Not ones you’d want to have a lot of fun with, if you know what I mean.” My stomach turns as I think of the Unconsecrated woman in the death cage and the others lining the hall beyond. He hasn’t moved any closer, just stands there knowing he’s blocking my only escape. “I keep telling Ox he should parade y’all around more often but he seems resistant to the idea. For now.”
My hand’s wrapped so tight around the knife handle in my pocket that I can feel the designs etched into it. “I’m just on my way home,” I tell him.
He laughs. “Aren’t we all.”
“Catcher’s coming right back.” I lift my chin. “He said this would be a short trip.”
“Not if I don’t set the crank on the plague bag down there he’s not,” the Recruiter says, gesturing at the Unconsecrated still turning the useless wheel, the gears disconnected. “Car’s stuck on that side of the river until I say so.”
I try to glance around discreetly and assess the situation. Except for a few other Recruiters huddled around their fires along the wall, we’re the only two out here. I’m sure none of them cares about what’s going on here—even if I screamed or called for help, I doubt anyone would notice. Which means I just have to get out of this situation on my own.
“Good night,” I tell him pointedly as I keep my hands shoved deep in my pockets and move down the platform. I step around him toward the stairs but as I pass he grabs a fistful of my hair.
“Back off,” I growl at him, but he doesn’t let go.
“It gets lonely out here,” he says, rubbing the ends of my hair along his jaw. “I just want to smell something clean and soft.”
My mouth goes dry. “Let go,” I bark, jerking my head away, but he yanks me until I’m arching my back, about to tumble over. He starts to move farther down the platform, pulling me into the darkness where no one will be able to see us. My feet scramble across the warped icy wood and I lash out at him, but I can’t gain much traction.
“Let go!” I shout again, beating at him with my fists and clawing at his eyes. He only yanks harder until my neck feels about to snap and I’m finding it difficult to even breathe.
“We’ve been keeping you all safe here on this island. Don’t you think we deserve some reward for that?” He winds his hand tighter through my hair, tangling it around his fingers.
I try to talk but he’s pulling my neck back so far my voice comes out as a gurgle that makes him laugh. I swipe at him but he easily dodges. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says. “Not unless you want me to.” He’s pulled me to the very edge of the platform and starts to unwind the scarf from around his neck, keeping his grip on my hair tight enough that any movement is too feeble to make a difference.
It’s when he starts to tug my arm from my jacket and ties his scarf around my wrist, looping the other end around the railing, that I realize just how far this trouble is escalating. That if I don’t act quickly, I might not be able to stop him at all.
He reaches for my other arm and I wrench my elbow up, connecting with his jaw. He shouts and starts to fall backward, tipped off balance. He stumbles a step, dragging me with him, and then the railing collapses and he falls off the end of the platform. His weight jerks against my hair, pulling me to my side on the rotting wood as a blinding pain tears across my scalp and neck. Frantic, I loop my legs around one of the remaining railing supports to stop myself from sliding after him.
I can barely breathe under the agony of his weight dragging on my hair and I flail for some way to make it stop. With his free hand he scrabbles f
or the edge of the platform but the wood’s old and wet with snow and crumbles under his fingers. “Help me!” he screams. Already I hear the Unconsecrated below shifting toward him, their footsteps a squelching crunch as they slog through frozen mud at the river’s edge.
“Pull me up!” he shouts, reaching for me. The pain’s blinding and I try to pry his fingers away but they’re too tangled. I feel the hairs start to pull from my head, searing pinpricks of bright agony.
“Let go!” I cry, but he won’t. I close my eyes and clench my jaw and fumble for the knife in my pocket, prying it open with my teeth. He’s starting to jerk against me as he tries to pull himself up. Moans fill the air around us, blood from my scalp saturating the air.
I shove the blade through my hair, sawing as hard and fast as I can. Finally, there’s so little hair left that it just pulls free, ripped from the roots with a torturous hot pain that makes me gag.
The man drops. I hear the crunch of him hitting the ground. Hot sticky blood trickles around my ear as I peer over the edge of the platform. My entire body shakes as I gulp in the frigid night air, terrified by what I’m about to see.
There’s just enough light from the fires on the island and the stars in the sky for me to see him. He’s mewling in agony as a throng of bodies slowly descends on him. A few drops of blood drip from my fingers into the mass below and as one they raise their heads to me, mouths wet and smeared red.
They stumble to the wall and scrape their fingers against the stone, their nails cracking and skin shredding as they push against a wall that I know in my heart can’t hold them back forever.
A few more stumble from the darkness. They tumble around each other, try to crawl over one another. And all of them stare up at me with milky blue eyes. Their mouths open. Their fingers reaching for me. As if I’m the only one who can save them.
I force myself away, slap my hands over my ears and shake my head, but I can still hear them. The sound is everywhere.
Tentatively, I reach up to my head and run my fingers over the ragged edges of what’s left of my once-long hair. The cold night air feels strange against the back of my ears and neck, my face too exposed without the curtain of my bangs. I gather handfuls of snow, using it to numb the throbbing pain of my scalp, and then I pull the Recruiter’s scarf from the railing and twine it carefully around my head.
It’s all I can do, so I stand up, hunch my shoulders against the cold and start making my way down the platform. Just then I see a figure walking along the shore. In the darkness it could be an Unconsecrated, except its steps are so purposeful that it must be a living being—but someone would have to be insane to walk on the wrong side of the wall with no protection from the dead.
I pull back into the shadows, curling tightly into a ball as the figure comes closer to the platform. I realize it’s more than one person—it’s a small group—and all of them wear dingy gray tunics underneath their coats. Soulers, their faces haggard and drawn.
It doesn’t make sense for them to be out here—for them to be on the island at all, much less on the wrong side of the wall. They each carry what looks like a shovel with a sharpened head and focus intently on the group of dead under the platform. As they approach the Unconsecrated they attack, lashing out to force them to the ground and then severing their heads from their bodies.
Their movements are brutally efficient as one by one they silence the moaning. When they get to the Recruiter he struggles a bit more, trying to call out, but he’s lost so much blood that he’s too weak to protest much.
He’s not dead yet. He hasn’t turned. Two of the Soulers shrug and move down the beach, nudging the Recruiter toward the river as if the frozen water could hasten his death. The third Souler crouches and watches the Recruiter flounder and choke, blood oozing from his mouth.
I watch him too. He was cruel to me. He’d have dragged me down with him or worse, and yet seeing him like this is almost too much. It’s almost too merciless.
As if it makes me as bad as they are.
“Stop it,” I call out.
The Souler stands, turning to look up at me. My heart stutters as my mind cycles to place the familiar face. And then I remember him: He was the boy with Amalia. He was the one who tried to protect her from the Recruiters.
“What are you doing? What’s going on?” I ask, crawling to the edge of the platform so that none of the other Recruiters hears us.
His eyes are dead, his shoulders slumped. He looks back at the Recruiter floundering in the frigid water, his skin turning blue. “Waiting for him to die and Return so I can kill him,” he says flatly.
I want to ask him why he doesn’t just do it now—why he’s waiting—but there’s still a line between the living and the dead, between mercy killing and murder, and I can understand someone not wanting to cross it.
“How long have you been out here?” I wonder how I could have missed this small group combing the shore, how I could have been so wrapped up in my own world.
He glances up at the stars, the weak light from the fires down the wall making his cheeks recede in the darkness. “Since this morning?” He says it as a question. “Recruiters kept us inside most of the day—said they’d only send us out at night so other people from the City don’t get ideas of coming over and swarming them.”
“But how did you even get here? Where did you come from?”
“We were in the Neverlands—stranded on a roof—and some guy told us we’d be safe if we came with him. He’s the one who brought us to a boat and got us across.”
A sick dread creeps into my stomach. “What was his name?”
He frowns, thinking. “Trapper? Caesar … It was something like that.”
“Catcher.”
He smiles, just barely. “Yeah, that’s it.”
I dig my nails into my palms, thinking about Catcher bringing these people across the river. Giving them false hope to lead them here and then abandoning them just outside the walls. Using them to keep the shores swept clean of Unconsecrated—letting them take the risk so that the Recruiters wouldn’t have to.
“You need to come inside,” I tell the boy. I move around to the ladder, reaching my hand toward him. “It’s freezing out here. You need food and sleep.”
He stares at my outstretched fingers and I see something flicker in his eyes. There’s a spark of hope and life. But then he shakes his head. “They’ll find me and throw me back over the wall,” he says. “The only way for us to earn a permanent spot on the Sanctuary is to serve our time. Keep the shore swept clear so the dead don’t pile up.”
“That’s absurd,” I tell him. “They can’t do that to you. Come on, I’ll take you home with me.” I curl my hand, beckoning him.
I know he wants nothing more than for me to pull him up and take him away. To tuck him into a bed piled with blankets and fill his stomach with warm food and hot tea. And so I know how amazingly difficult it is for him to turn me down. “I can’t,” he whispers. “I can’t leave the others. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“You can’t trust the Recruiters,” I implore, but he stands firm, refusing my offer.
I’m afraid to know the answer but I have to ask: “Is Amalia with you?”
A brief movement of pain flashes across his face. “She’s already gone,” he says. Before I can ask more he walks out into the shallow water where the Recruiter lies still, floating among the shards of ice. I hadn’t even noticed him die. He’d been utterly alone in the last moments, not that he deserved anything better.
The dead sometimes scream when they Return, a horrid eerie cry. That’s what happens now, a plaintive wail that’s cut short as the boy’s blade slices through the Recruiter’s neck and severs his spinal cord. His head tumbles into the shallows while his body bobs in the gentle waves.
In the distance someone shouts, the sound of the Recruiter’s cry still echoing. One last time I try to convince the boy to come with me, but he just turns back along the shore after the others, and I push myself away d
own the platform and run for home.
Once I’m there the events of the night hit me. There’s no way I can sleep, and the air inside feels stale, like a cell. Leaving the scarf wrapped around my head, I retreat to the roof.
The storm from earlier’s blown past, wisps of clouds still stuck to the stars. The rising moon’s almost full and its glow sets everything around me into an eerie bright stillness.
The muscles along my jaw feel tight, as if I’ve been trying to hold back a scream, and I remember the infected woman on the roof that night that seems like several lifetimes ago. I think of what it felt like to dip my fingers in the colored stains she’d left behind—the feel of release without words, screaming in images.
I grab a few chunks of wood from a long-ago fire and use them for charcoal, long black streaks crumbling under my touch. I shut everything else off but the feel of my body moving, the joy and need of it. Leaving the smallest part of me to listen for anyone approaching, the rest of me indulging in the release of creating.
I draw out lines, shade in contours. Sore muscles along my arms and shoulders protest and I push them harder. Underneath my fingers shapes begin to form, faces and bodies straining against the wall. Sweat breaks out on my neck and down my back and I lose all track of time and place. I forget the pain along my scalp, the way the cold air seeps against the back of my ears.
It’s just me and the wood and the wall. Images that flash in my mind and are translated by my fingers before I can see them and piece them together. It’s like I’m not even involved, just a conversation between hand and subconscious. I sweep lines out and then smudge them with my wrist: a woman’s hair tangling in the breeze. I sketch a child’s lips around a crack: a perpetual scream.
As I step back, I realize what I’ve been drawing. Etched along the length of the wall is an army of people, stretching from side to side and deep into the distance. They shuffle toward me, fingers outstretched and pleading.